


New Roots

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Leaf and Letter [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, F/F, Family Issues, Femslash, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Meet-Cute, Plants, Pre-Femslash, Writers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3179675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I think a fic with gardener Jade and author Rose would be nice.  Perhaps Rose was buying flowers for her mom, or Rose simply keeps a garden at home.  Maybe Jade could be the person who helps Rose out, then discovers that Rose was the person who wrote Jade's favorite book.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Roots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Dear [Ghost_Assist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghost_Assist), your prompt was too adorable to resist. I hope you enjoy the fic!

The series launch tour for _Opening Gambit_ lasted a month and a half, covered six countries and three continents, and was the first time Rose Lalonde had left her home for more than a day since she'd bought the place. By the time she returned, it felt like a stranger's abode rather than her own. It was also downright unwelcoming.

She looked around at the stark white walls, the bare, Modernist aesthetic, and the little gallery of wizard portraits that lined the hallway, wondering at the source of her unease, and abruptly realized she'd recreated her mother's house.

"Fuck," she said.

Hadn't the whole point of moving to New Jersey, getting a deliberately humdrum job at a county college library, and supporting herself off her own wages and the advances and royalties for her previous series been to learn how to stand on her own? Hadn't she written an entire tetralogy on the subject of overcoming poisonous family ties? (Couched in the trappings of urban fantasy and horror, naturally -- there were few things that a generous helping of eldritch horrors didn't improve on a narrative level -- but even so. In retrospect the whole business had been embarrassingly confessional, from Persephone Noir's name on down.)

Apparently she hadn't moved on nearly as well as she'd thought.

Rose dropped her suitcase just inside the door, next to the mail table, and went to pour herself a stiff drink from the liquor cabinet whose contents her mother replaced and augmented at every possible gift-giving occasion. Then she looked at the refrigerator, which was bare except for the hideous set of bronzed baby booties that her mother had made into magnets and sent as a housewarming present, and emptied the vodka bottle down the sink.

Right. Enough recriminations.

Something had to be done.

The next day, after she picked up her mail from the post office and her cat from her veterinarian's boarding facility, Rose drove along Main Street in search of a... florist? Or whatever plant shops called themselves; it wasn't a subject she'd ever researched. Obviously the true solution to her mistakes required a complete change of interior design, from furniture to wallpaper, but while she plotted her grand campaign, the least she could do was acquire a houseplant. Or failing that, a vase of flowers.

She was certain her mother had never brought actual flowers into the house. They weren't nearly ostentatious enough.

She drove past several shopping plazas with no luck, and had almost decided to throw herself on the mercy of supermarket bouquets (which would doubtless decay the moment she reached home and thus defeat the purpose of the exercise), when she spotted a low, unassuming building next to the power-line slashing that divided her town from the neighboring borough, with a promising sign: _What Pumpkin Botanical Emporium_.

Well, why not?

Rose pulled into the small gravel lot, parked her faithful secondhand car, and ventured inside.

The door opened onto a small room into which two blocky desks and six large coolers full of cut flowers had been crammed. The coolers filled the space with a steady hum and blue-white fluorescent glow, which was softened slightly by the incandescent bulbs in yellow glass fixtures overhead. The desk in the middle of the far wall held a computer and credit card scanner; the other seemed to be a freestanding workspace for arranging bouquets. To the left of the payment desk, a glass door led into what appeared to be a greenhouse, the back of which Rose couldn't see through the riotous plants that both rose from tables and hung downward from numerous hooks and pipes.

A large dog -- shaggy, white, of indeterminate breed -- raised its head from its paws by the greenhouse door and barked once.

"Just a minute!" a voice called from somewhere out of sight.

Rose looked at the dog. It licked its teeth, then dropped its head back onto its paws and ignored her.

About thirty seconds later, a young woman with long black hair tramped up a set of stairs Rose had previously overlooked. She set a stack of terracotta pots onto the floor, dusted her hands on her denim skirt, and smiled.

It was a very attractive smile: bucktoothed, bright, and either genuinely happy or a nearly perfect imitation thereof. Rose felt her own mouth quirking upwards involuntarily in response.

"Hello welcome to What Pumpkin sorry to keep you waiting my name is Jade Harley how can I help you today?" the woman said, too rapidly for normal punctuation to keep up.

Rose took a moment to parse this. Then she said, "I'm thinking of buying some plants."

Jade Harley nodded. "That's always a good decision, and you've certainly come to the right place! Indoor or outdoor? And if outdoor, do you want to start from seeds or seedlings, or would you rather buy something that's already a recognizable bush or tree?"

Somehow, a garden had failed to occur to Rose as an option. It would certainly help set her home apart from her childhood house -- which had no landscaping whatsoever beyond a patch of grassy lawn and then untouched pine forest -- but no, that wouldn't solve her immediate problem. Perhaps another day, though.

"Indoor." She thought a moment and added, "Something hard to kill. I've never kept houseplants, so I don't want to be too ambitious."

"No plants at all? That's sad! But better late than never," Jade said. She scratched above her left ear, eyes drifting sideways in thought. "Hmm. Cacti are more finicky than people often think -- overwatering is just as bad as underwatering, you know! -- but some other succulents are pretty tough. Come with me and we'll see if any of them catch your eye."

She strode across the room, nudged the dog aside with her boot, and opened the greenhouse door. Rose followed, admiring Jade's hair and the careless confidence of her walk. Briefly, her eyes drifted downward, but she couldn't discern much about the other woman's figure through the motion of her skirt and hair. Besides, that was rude. She yanked her gaze back up and concentrated on ducking the tendrils and leaves that hung down into the narrow paths between tables and pots.

The greenhouse was warm, its air moist and somehow alive in a way both attractive and utterly foreign to Rose's experience of indoor space. If this was what plants could do for her home, she could hardly wait to cover her bookcases with green and hang pots in all her windows.

Jade led Rose all the way to the back wall, which was lined with shelves of squat, prickly things rising from sand rather than soil, and basking under heat lamps. "Not those," Jade said when she noticed the direction of Rose's gaze. "To your right. I think you'd do best with an aloe, or maybe a snake plant."

Rose turned and examined the plants Jade indicated, sitting in irregular rows on a waist-high table. One type had somewhat tongue-shaped leaves, pointing stiffly upright, marked with a tiger-stripe pattern in varying shades of green. The other type had fleshier, more three-dimensional leaves, edged with residual barbs, that arched downward like a nest of tentacles. One of them looked almost exactly like her mental image of the Guardian of the Gates that Persephone Noir faced as the last challenge on her way back from the Furthest Ring to the everyday human world.

Really, there was no choice at all. "This one," Rose said, and lifted her chosen little knot of mint-green tentacles. The leaves tickled as they draped over her hands and wrists.

"Aloes are excellent houseplants! They're hardy, and while they're not nearly as medically useful as people often claim, if you break a leaf and rub the juice on your skin, it _is_ kind of soothing," said Jade. "You'll want to repot it, of course, so let's get you set with a bag of the right soil, some fertilizer, a watering can, and so on. Pots are along the north wall. Pick one about twice the size of the little plastic thing your aloe's in right now, and I'll round up the rest of the stuff. All right?"

She smiled at Rose, still genuinely happy, but somehow impersonal: the pleasure was at human contact in general, or at finding a home for one of her plants, not at anything specific to Rose.

Rose stamped down the sudden, fierce desire to see Jade Harley smile just for her. She was simply reacting to her release from the artificiality of book tours, and the hungry interest of her publisher and agent. Jade Harley was most likely heterosexual and taken. All the good ones were. ...And she was letting the conversational pause drag on a little too long to be graceful.

"Yes, that's fine, thank you," Rose said, and wove her way through the damp green maze of the greenhouse to browse for an appropriate container.

Five minutes later, she returned to the front room, stepped over the sleeping dog, and set a square gray ceramic pot and saucer on the payment desk. Jade ran a handheld scanner over their tags, and then manually typed something on the screen rather than scan the aloe itself. She tugged a sheet of brown paper out from a drawer, wrapped the pot and saucer, and tucked them into a paper bag with handles and a little green pumpkin logo.

"I got you a small bag of cactus soil and some Miracle Gro," Jade said, pulling the sides of the bag apart to show Rose its contents. "I figured you might want to pick your own watering can, though. I have some cheap plastic ones, but you can find slightly nicer options at most big box stores and there are probably some _really_ fancy things at some of the knick-knack gift shops in the old town center."

Her mother would have bought something in pure copper, impossible to maintain at its maximum shine unless polished every day.

"Cheap is fine," Rose said, and waited while Jade ducked back into the greenhouse and retrieved a lime-green pot with a long spout that might hold, at most, a quart of water. It had a lopsided fruit wreath pattern printed into both sides. Rose had rarely seen anything tackier.

She loved it on sight.

Jade scanned the watering pot and added it to the bag. "That'll be fifty-three forty-nine. Cash, check, or credit?"

Rose handed over her card and waited for the scanner to print the merchant copy of her receipt. She signed with a flourish, muscle memory from her recent marathon autograph sessions creating her fancy and legible fan-friendly signature rather than the chicken-scratch she degenerated to between publicity tours.

Jade picked it up, glanced between the paper and the back of Rose's credit card, and then froze. "Ohmygosh."

Rose winced. "I know they don't match well, my apologies, I swear there's a good explanation for--"

"You're Rose Lalonde!" Jade exclaimed as the card scanner printed out the customer copy. "You wrote the Persephone Noir series! I _love_ those books! They're the best thing I've read in years!"

"Oh, well, thank you?" Rose managed after a moment.

Jade flushed, color rising hectic in her pale cheeks. "I'm sorry, I'm probably embarrassing you. It's just, it's so rare to find books about a gay woman that aren't _about_ her being a lesbian, you know? Instead they're all about family and monsters and grief and magic and adventures and Sephy saving the day by being _smart_ instead of just because her mom was a blood witch and her dad was a horrorterror. I have all four books in hardcover and I think I've read them about twenty times each."

Rose was glad her skin hid the answering heat she could feel in her own face. "I'm glad they made such a positive impact on you," she said. "I wrote that story mostly for myself, so it's always a little overwhelming to hear that my creation resonated with other people as well."

"It did, it really did," Jade said. She looked down at her hands and twitched. "Oh! Right, here's your card, and let me get your copy of the receipt." She tore the narrow paper away from the card scanner and handed both items across the desk to Rose.

Feeling greatly daring, Rose caught Jade's fingers before they could withdraw.

"I'm grateful to you for helping me find a plant today. Would you like me to autograph your books as a thank-you?"

Jade swallowed. "Oh. Um. Yes, of course! But I don't have them with me, and I don't want to inconvenience you."

"I'm sure I'll be back soon for more plants," Rose said, "but I can't be specific about that and it seems rude to make you keep the books here just in case. So instead, what if we met for lunch tomorrow? Noon, at that little Italian place by the train station?"

Jade's fingers tensed. "Are you-- is this-- I don't mean to make assumptions, but... would that be a date?"

Rose beat back all her reflexive fears that Jade couldn't possibly be what she seemed, that her enthusiasm for Rose's books must be a sham, that she would never like Rose once they got to know each other, that she probably wasn't interested in women at all, that this could only end in disaster.

"Yes," she said.

"Oh," said Jade. "In that case, yes. Um. Not that I wouldn't have said yes even if you were just being friendly! Because I like friends. But, um, you're awfully pretty and you're an amazing writer and I'd really like to kiss you if you don't think that's moving too fast."

"Not at all," Rose said, and leaned across the counter to press her lips to Jade's.

**Author's Note:**

> Some further notes on Rose's imaginary urban fantasy/horror series are available [here on my journal](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/831276.html), if you're interested. :-)


End file.
